Title: A fresh start
Date: 2017-06-04
Modified: 2017-12-07
Category: Blog
Slug: a-fresh-start
Tags: announcement
Summary: A new beginning for this place - well overdue!

As you might have noticed, things look a bit different around here. Things are
cleaner, simpler, smaller and just plain better. This change, long overdue, is
something I decided to do instead of my actual work, because among my many other
flaws, I am also a procrastinator without peer. So, welcome to the new
retro-freedom.nz; please make yourselves comfortable.

I made these changes for several reasons, which I will endeavour to describe
below, to the best of my ability.

## The old setup was too magical ##

I don't like Ruby. I don't like how it runs, how it's designed, and in general.
I used Octopress before, because when I just got into it, it was recommended to
me as an easy place to start. At the time, given how little I knew, it probably
was - however, now that I know a bit more, it looks like a crufty,
unmaintainable, magical mess, which I neither understand nor can (or want to)
hack on.

It sticks JavaScript into my pages whose purpose I do not know or understand. It
relies on a bunch of things to generate pages whose innards are completely
unknown to me and don't make any sense. It requires a bunch of things to
properly work which I have no desire to learn. It needs a full JavaScript engine
to even generate anything. On top of all that, it's an old
version, and every time I've asked anyone seemingly related to that project how
to migrate, I got met with a wall of silence.

In my opinion, the current solution is much cleaner, much less magical and
generally makes a whole lot more sense.

## The old content no longer reflects who I am ##

I drank the GNU/FSF Kool-Aid *hard*. This certainly reflected itself in what I
posted; at the time, it made sense. Now, being a bit more aware of certain basic
realities of the world, and my stance on them, I no longer identify with this
kind of thinking for the most part. Furthermore, my old content was, for lack of
a better word, rather juvenile. While it certainly was fun to make (in places),
I don't think this is what I want to be associated with anymore. Furthermore,
this is not the kind of thing I want there to be more *of* in the world today.

## The setup I had discouraged me from writing ##

Due to the ugliness of the whole setup I was running, I found I almost never
blogged at all. This runs totally counter to the point of *having a blog as
such*. Thus, anything which makes it easier for me to blog is something I should
embrace, and this new set-up seems to do just that.

So in short, things are a-changed around here. With any luck, I'll be able to start
putting up my thoughts and discoveries soon enough. That being said, if you
liked my old angry, ranty self, you'll still get some of that, just in a 
different form, targeted at different things. It'll still be fun - just 
*differently* fun.
